Working at KAPS

Last week, Aaron and I spent our Saturday at the local animal shelter (KAPS) in Daegu. We went to the dog shelter, which is on the 3rd and 4th floor of a building. One of the veteran volunteers, Emma, met us outside at 10am and we proceeded to go upstairs to start the day. Our first task was finding a shaggy dog, or at least one that required clipping so that Emma could show us how to clip. The first dog Emma chose was a shih tzu. It had to have its rear end shaved, then got washed and then was fully clipped if needed (mainly around its ears). Aaron and I then chose a schnauzer (the label on her cage said yorkie, but it wasn't). It was quite hairy around its ears and had a bobby tail @_@ I felt somewhat bad because it was so happy to see us and then we ended up washing and shaving its tail off. Emma had to shave the rest of the tail because I somehow managed to clip it into a broom shape -.-;
We eventually ended up with a brown maltese puppy, which was surprisingly cute. She was a real scaredy cat when it came to anything but hugs. Unfortunately, she had an extreme case of mites to the point where she would cry out as she constantly scratched her ears and paws. I felt so bad for her and we had run out of something called BioKill (used to kill insects and mites), so Emma put shampoo on her ears until we came back from lunch with Sunnan, the woman from the cat shelter, who gave us some powder to help against the mites and brought a botel of Biokill. We had to wash the puppy and its cagemate (who was starting to get it too), and she kept crying as we washed her. The entire time! Not only that, but she also tried to lick the shampoo~ She was a crazy puppy :P Aaron sat with her in his lap in front of the heating fan while Emma combed the mites out of her ears. She eventually burrowed in Aaron's lap and tried to sleep while randomly jerking up to bite a leg or scratch an ear.
After we put her back, we decided to walk some of the larger dogs. There were two jindos, an afghan, and an oversexed cocker spaniel. I walked the larger of the two jindo dogs (they look a bit like shiba inus @_@) and she was really cute. Well, until we walked outside and she took a giant poop in the parking lot. Aaron was walking the afghan, but it was too skinny and managed to escape its lead, so once Emma caught it, she decided to walk it. We walked around Duryu park, but it was really crowded for a Saturday. There was some sort of event going on at the cultural center. Aaron's new dog (the smaller jindo), had runny issues, so apparently it was leaking randomly during the entire walk. A random man walked up to me and said something along the lines of "mal upda", but I had no clue what he was talking about, so like I always do, I smiled at him and walked away. However, he followed me and eventually caught up to Emma and was talking to her. She managed to figure out that he said the dog was bleeding or something (the female dogs were in heat). He continued to follow us until we found Sunnan. She said that he wanted to take the dog home with him. When she told him she was afraid he would eat the dog, he promised he would eat other dogs, but not this one @__@
Coming back from the walk, our job was to wash my jindo while Emma and the other volunteer shaved down a yorkshire terrier that looked like it had gone through a washing machine. Our job was quite difficult as the jindo did not seem to like water. It was getting quite chilly (it was around 5:30 by then), so we decided to end early and just pick out all the thorns from its coat. By the time we had finished, it had random blotches of white where the shampoo had worked, but other parts of it were still grey. Maybe next time we'll get to it fully....

Changing of the seasons

It's finally October. Apparently blogspot has been disabled on all of the school computers (it really did not help that I somehow ended up opening 20 tabs of my blog at one of my schools -.-;), which is why I have not been writing. So much has happened as of late! The seasons are changing and I notice the leaves of the persimmon tree are starting to fall off. The forests are starting to shed their leaves, distributing yellow, red, and brown leaves everywhere. The rice fields are starting to turn yellow and I think the harvest time will be near. Maybe by next week, the fields will be barren!

We found a Costco in Daegu. It's a bit far from the subway station, so we took a taxi last time, but there is so much Western food there. It's almost like the Costco back home. A little bit of a reminder of home.

We have also started volunteering at the local animal shelter. It is separated into the cat and dog compound. The cats live in an abandoned house and a backyard, but the dogs live on the 3rd and 4th floor of a building in cages. Aaron and I have decided that we will walk, wash, and possibly groom the dogs as they require the most attention. Apparently a lot of owners just let their dogs go into the street when it becomes too expensive to take care of them. One of the dogs now at the shelter was found in a forest. It was left to die with a wire wrapped around its neck! Understandably, it is afraid of us and we only saw it peeking around the corner before it ran away to hide again.

The food here is amazing. We have been going to grill restaurants and ordering randomly off of the menu as we had no clue what most of the words meant. However, I wrote down some of the menu items and had them translated. There was a somewhat embarassing moment when the owner grabbed the menu from me because he saw me copying it. He probably thought I was trying to steal some trade secret or something? Anyways, there are two types of grill restaurants where we have been to. The first one has a metal slate that is heated where the meat is cooked on, and the other one is a round metal plate with holes and is heated by coals underneath. Both places have about the same menu. At one point, we ordered something that we had no idea what it was. It looked like the backbone of something small and I thought it tasted like eel. However, when I asked one of my teachers about the translation, they said it was called hagfish.... Look that up @_@ Oddly enough, Aaron does enjoy it, but I find it tastes somewhat weird.

Chuseok weekend, which was a 4 day weekend, was really relaxing for Aaron and I. We spent most of the time at home. It was too difficult to travel around as everyone was doing the same thing, trying to get back to their home towns. For Chuseok, people go home to their families and home towns (or wives go to their husband's families) to spend time together and visit their ancestors' graves. The women prepare a lot of food to eat and to take to the graves to be blessed. I was invited by my co-teacher, Mrs. Kim from Gaejin Elementary school, to join her family in the preparation of food. I got to meet her family and helped prepare a lot of tasty food :P Afterwards, her mother-in-law packed containers and containers of food for me to take home so that Aaron could try. There is still a lot sitting in the fridge because we cannot finish it all.